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Pitlochry Festival TheatreFour starsA killing moon beams down with various shades of
intensity throughout Richard Baron’s revival of Rona Munro’s play, inspired by
the last woman to be burnt as a witch. It was an execution which took place in
the Highlands in 1727, just before such superstitions were supposed to have
been swept away by the Scottish Enlightenment. As Deirdre Davis’ Janet Horne is
tortured by the authorities in the second half of the play, however, the
language used against her resembles some of the misogynist hate speech used by
some men on social media to demonise women who dare to be different or else
just have an opinion. At first things all look a bit Ab Fab, with
Janet a free-spirited hippy mum to Fiona Wood’s scowly but practical teenage
daughter Helen. Janet is wilfully singular, sexually confident and able to
shroud herself with a mystique that both beguiles and terrifies the villagers.
While Janet is able to intoxicate them with hallucinogens from the earth, He…

If a
picture paints a thousand words, Pam Hogg is probably the perfect choice to
design costumes for the Citizens Theatre company’s new production of Cyrano de
Bergerac. It was a picture, after all, that got Hogg the gig on Dominic Hill’s
revival of the late Edwin Morgan’s Scots translation of Edmond Rostand’s
classic nineteenth century yarn, first presented by Communicado Theatre Company
in 1992. When
Hogg was first contacted by Hill about collaborating on his new co-production
with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, before they
met, she put an image from her archive onto her phone. This was a typically
instinctive move by Hogg, designed to give a taster of what she might be able
to bring to the play, in which the poetic Cyrano is so embarrassed by his big
nose that he is unable to express his love for the beautiful Roxanne. When Hill
and Hogg met, Hill too pulled out an image to illustrate his own thoughts about
the play. Both images were the same. “That…

Anne
Downie had never heard of The Yellow on the Broom when she was approached with
a view to adapting the first part of Betsy Whyte’s memoirs of growing up in a Scottish
Traveller community in the 1920s and 1930s for the stage. The idea had come
from playwright Tom McGrath, who was then Associate Literary Director for
Scotland, who suggesting to John Carnegie, the then head of Winged Horse theatre
company that Whyte’s captivating story, which she first started writing in the
1970s, might make a good play. “It
toured everywhere,” says Downie on the eve of a revival of the play at Dundee
Rep almost thirty years after it first appeared. “It opened in Skye, and went
all over Scotland. It was on at the Tron in Glasgow, and a woman came up to me
from what I think was then Strathclyde Region, and she wondered if there might
be any possibility of it going on in the camps, because while the women from
the camps would come and see it, the men wouldn’t go into theatres. It never
happened, which …

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.